Moroccan immigrant literature: A new space for identity negotiation

By Mimoune Daoudi | OMC 2025

Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash

This article attempts to contribute to the ongoing debate in the field of Cultural Studies, revolving around border crossing, transnationalism, and interculturalism. Within an increasingly shrinking world where flows of capital, information, people, images and ideas are disseminated by an incessant growth of information technologies, the shift towards the transnational dimension of cultural transformation and cross-cultural exchange has become a timely necessity. Indeed, a heated debate has been raised during the last two decades about issues pertaining to mobility and the exilic experience of immigrant people in either the political, sociological, or cultural dimensions. My approach focuses on the poetics of space-making through a look back to ‘Home’ and the critical avenues it opens. It suggests how a return to ‘Home’ and one’s roots can broaden the understanding of what it means to be in a continuous process of reconstructing the space of home and its corresponding identity.

There are ways in which Moroccan immigrant writers construct and represent Moroccan space, culture and identity in their fictional work. These migrant writers contribute to building national narratives whereby they try to offer a narrative that might be regarded as an alternative to national identity. What is common among their texts is the notion of ‘Home’ as a common thematic concern. In fact, the notion of home becomes an abstraction, a desire for a lost origin, an ideal setting for nostalgia and memory. With Moroccan immigrant writers, an intersection of home, memory and belonging becomes fundamental in shaping their diasporic identity.

The experience of migration is neither stable nor static, it is rather loaded with trauma and melancholy experienced by the travelling subjects. In this sense, James Clifford states that cultural action, the making and remaking of identities, take place in the contact zones, along the transgressive intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales. ‘Contact Zone’ is a term coined by Mary Louise Pratt defined as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’.’ Ethnically and culturally different people come into contact through the phenomenon of immigration and hence establish ongoing relations of subordination and inequality. Europe and America host millions of people who seek political, intellectual or economic survival. Such a movement has stirred a heated cultural debate related to identity construction and nationhood. 

This massive migratory movement has considerably affected almost every nation and every facet of life including the Moroccan one. In fact, following each of the two World Wars, European economies, in an attempt to look for ways of recovery, encouraged the immigration of Moroccans and other foreign workers, and enticed them with the offer of better living conditions than those in the country of origin. Therefore, thousands of Moroccan workers left the country to reside in Europe, mainly in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. An increasing number of Moroccan workers started building a family life within the host communities. As a consequence, with a double sense of belonging, a new generation emerged inhabiting an in-between space; that is, a space composed of two identities: the one brought by the parents and the other acquired within the host community.

Born of crisis and change, and suffering from aches of an imaginary journey homeward, displaced agents are positioned at the interstices of different spaces, histories, and languages. As a result, cultural production is seen to echo the split subjectivities and fragmented consciousnesses. Seen as the product of different interrelated cultures and histories, immigrants live hard moments with the burden of double-consciousness and double-homes. In this respect, terms such as postcoloniality, alterity, nomadism, and deterritorialisation are used to represent this non-Western literary production.

In addition to the complex and heated debate over language and identity that these writings instigate, literary texts produced by dislocated immigrant writers serve as condensed archives of cultural and linguistic memories of the home-nation. They are a record of the experiences of a community. In fact, remembering the cultural collective memory of the nation and recording it in a language not one’s own and within an alien space undergo an intersection between languages, identities, and cultures. Put differently: in sharing their experiences of multiple linguistic, geographical and historical dislocations, these writers invite their readers to conceive of culture not as a monolithic model but in its interaction with other cultures, languages, and memories. They really experience life in the hyphen. A hyphen connects and separates, agrees and contests. It creates and formulates new national dimensions as we start hearing of Turkish-German, Algerian-French, Moroccan-Dutch, and Chicano-Spanish authors whose identities oscillate between the homeland and the host space. The hyphen in this case connects and at the same time instigates contest with regard to belonging. To approach these migrant voices, I argue, one needs to view them not as representatives of a secluded marginalised group that is ghettoised within a sequestered space; rather, it would be more significant to view them as complex signifying systems whereby spaces of language, memory and history are interlaced.

By way of conclusion, this article tried to draw the attention of both readers and critics to the new emerging voices in the diaspora and their contribution to Moroccan postcolonial literature. Moroccan immigrant writers debate the Moroccan postcolonial identity in a globalised world. Through a process of migration, Moroccan writers transcend the more traditional notions or constructions of ‘location’, ‘home’, and ‘identity’ by forging new narrative strategies that seek to negotiate a new relationship with identity and location. In today’s postmodern condition, it is not geographical or even political boundaries that determine identities but rather a place of consistency that goes beyond the traditional idea of nation and determines its new transcendental configuration.

Dr. Mimoune Daoudi 

Mimoune is a professor of Cultural Studies at the university of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Fez, Morocco. He is interested in migrant literature including Moroccan writings in Europe and America.